Advanced Democracy
Ideally, I think, individuals could basically do it the way they wanted to. They could choose which domains they would defer to other people of their choice, which things/domains they would decide for themselves, etc. For now, here's some of my previous writings about more advanced Democracy: Old Blog Post I’ve either been told about or dreamed up: *Enable voting for more than one option, so that votes are not split between two similar positions, but can be given to both. *Vote only for individual laws (and policies?), never for people. **If some people think this is too much work, then perhaps they could choose (yes, choose, not vote for) a representative (which could be an individual or a group) who will vote for them. This representative’s vote would count for as many people as they represent. *Proportional Representation, so that everyone’s vote counts regardless of who their neighbors vote for. I think the NDP in Canada are currently pushing for this ^^ *Draw one (or a small odd number, like 13) ballots from all ballots cast. Use this draw to pick a winner. I forget what benefits this was supposed to have, but it gives close ties a more even chance of winning. Voter supression, and other methods of manipulating close ties, would be less effective. Over time, all closely tied parties would have won about an equal number of times. Recent Comment on Someone's Blog Here’s a comment I made about the meaning of voting “paradoxes” on another great youtube video on the subject: Note something about one of these "paradoxes". The one where the money is added to the chocolate choice. Adding that money works as an investigative experiment. Notice the results. Only some people decided that it was now worth changing their choice. Why didn't the others? Because their preference was somehow stronger than even the allure of the added money. So if you're measuring some kind of preference satisfaction magnitude to determine whether the voting system is good or not, perhaps the result (vanilla wins) actually is truly best. Resolving the apparent "paradox". (of course, to make sure this is correct, you'd have to quantify the preference of everyone else too, not just the vanilla voters...and a problem remains any time the math shows that actually vanilla creates a lower average satisfaction magnitude or whatever. But then that's solved by a new method which just maximizes the magnitude of that variable directly.) Though, of course, some voting “paradoxes” might simply be an even tie. Also, I ran into someone at the Calgary Civic Tech first meeting. He claimed it’s been “mathematically proven” that, for electronic voting, you have to either sacrifice voter anonymity, or else preserve anonymity but get some other bad thing (maybe auditability or something, I forget). He seemed really worried about this, and was very explicitly opposed to electronic voting. Anyways, I pointed out that we’re kind of inching towards lack of anonymity anyways. Because of the internet. Since voting is just a measurement of personal views and preference, then you can already see what someone will vote if you know their preferences, and the internet is making this info more widely available. And then, of course, I speculated that if info is so available and trustworthy, it could be the vote. You won’t vote anymore as a discrete event (it would be an outdated measurement technology). The data about the population’s preference will just be consulted any time it needs to be. And of course I’ve got ideas for how to deal with the issue of trust. See also *The Shape of Things to Come *Division of Information Labor, from Simple to Advanced *My Perfect Utopia